The Marias Massacre

Some people say that blame for the eventual downfall of the great Indian nations of the Northwest should be laid at the feet of the Corps of Discovery. Or that the ruin of the Blackfeet in particular is entirely traceable to Meriwether Lewis‘s reaction to the eight Piegans who tried to steal his guns and horses on the morning of 27 July 1806. Or that Lewis had turned them against all Americans the night before when he told the eight that his own nation’s traders would supply guns and other goods to their enemies, the Nez Perces, the Shoshones, and the rest. But scapegoating is too simple an answer.

This story is far too complicated to be told fully in a few hundred words, and besides, the factual details are still cloudy. Many foul deeds on both sides, over a span of 64 years, led up to the terrible events of a bitterly cold January morning in 1870, at the extreme upper end of present Lake Elwell, 20 miles northeast of Conrad, Montana. But the greatest guilt clearly fell on the side of the U.S. Cavalry. According to one of the officers involved, it was “the greatest slaughter of Indians ever made by U.S. troops.” Once again, the victims were Piegans.

While only a few Blackfeet chiefs were openly hostile toward Americans, a number of young Piegan and Blood men, angry over broken promises, diminished buffalo herds, and loss of land, had been carrying on a guerrilla war for some years. The most prominent among them was one named Mountain Chief.

Some settlers repeatedly demanded that the government do something about their “problem.” Ultimately, the senior military officer for the territory, General Philip Sheridan, responded with a fateful decision from his office in Chicago: “If the lives and property of citizens of Montana can best be protected by striking Mountain Chief’s band, I want them struck. Tell Baker to strike them hard.” “Baker” was Brevet Colonel Eugene Baker of the Second Cavalry.

At 8:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, 23 January 1870, within easy range of the 32 skin lodges clustered near the Marias River beneath the bluffs, 200 soldiers opened fire with their fifty-caliber rifles. By 11:00 a.m. 120 men and 53 women and children had been slaughtered and the camp totally destroyed. There were 140 survivors, but when their captors suspected evidence of smallpox among them, they were all released to fend for themselves; many froze to death before they could find shelter. The cavalry suffered one fatality.

Before the first shot was fired an Army scout named Joe Kipp tried to warn Colonel Baker that the camp the guns were trained on was not Mountain Chief’s. It was indeed the village of the peaceable Heavy Runner, who was the first to be shot as he emerged from his lodge waving his safe-conduct paper.

In many ways, the “Baker Massacre” is roughly analogous to the My Lai (pronounced MEE-lie) Massacre led by Lieutenant William Calley in Viet Nam, in March 1968.^[2]Edited by Vernon Carroll.

Just fifteen miles to the southeast is another historic place stained by hatred, which has no monument except the collective, anguished memory of the Blackfeet people.

Lewis and his three companions were watchful every moment of their journey through Marias River country, for they had been led to expect trouble from the Blackfeet. Even the captain himself shared the nightwatch. They were fighting men on 24-hour alert.

The hand-to-hand combat that ultimately ensued between those four Americans and eight Blackfeet on the bank of the Two Medicine River at dawn on 26 July 1806, may have been a result of miscommunication, misunderstanding, and suspicion.^[3]See Fight on the Two Medicine. Students of the episode disagree over whether it was the root and cause of continuing hostilities between the two cultures, even though it was clearly the Indian men who initiated the fight. In any case, a deep shadow of danger and paranoia hung over the Marias River country for more than sixty years, and was to prevail in a different guise a hundred years later on.

The twentieth century’s longest and most expensive conflict began in the late 1940s and ended in the late 80s. It was an exhausting era of ideological rivalry, risky power plays, and emotional abuse between the Soviet Republic and the United States. This ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) headquarters building, begun about 1970, was to have been part of the United States’ first line of defense against a transpolar missile attack. With seven basements, it was considered to be suitably hardened against nuclear warheads.

As a monument to the Cold War, this nameless, graceless megalith could last longer than the pyramids of Egypt. In centuries to come it may be a shrine to a cultural memory, a reminder that the Marias River country once was a primary target of another nation’s weapons. A reminder that for several decades, every time the news media reported a crisis in Russian-American relations, people hereabouts, whatever their ancestry, tended to glance toward the northern horizon.

Further Reading

The Blackfeet Confederacy (on this site) by Jay H. Buckley.

Arlen J. Large, “Riled-up Blackfoot: Did Meriwether Lewis Do It?” We Proceeded On, Vol. 22, No. 4 (November, 1996), 4-11.

Robert J. Ege, “Strike Them Hard!” Bellevue, Nebraska: The Old Army Press, 1970.

Stan Gibson, “An Uncelebrated Anniversary,” http://www.dickshovel.com/parts.html.

The story of the massacre is told in Chapter 35 of the novel Fool’s Crow (1986), by James Welch (1940-2003), himself the offspring of a Blackfeet father and a Gros Ventre mother.